ipstack looks like an excellent IP geolocation service with a beautiful API. If you haven’t used anything except for the MaxMind GeoIP, give it a try. Their pricing is quite good, with 10,000 lookups per month going for free.
Category: All
All posts across the whole website belong to this category. They might also belong to some other categories as well, but this one holds all of them. Hence the descriptive name – All.
Gitea – self-hosted Git service
Hacker News : What are your favorite terminal programs?
This Hacker News thread is full of useful and cool command line applications. Check them out, if you want to challenge or change your fingertip memory.
Magnasanti: The Largest and Most Terrifying SimCity
Here is an interesting story for all the fans of SimCity and similar games, as well as for anyone who still thinks that computer games are a useless time waste. I’d like to see you try doing something even remotely close to this:
This story reminds me of all the time I spent playing Transport Tycoon Deluxe and OpenTTD. The game is fun and I learned a lot about transportation. But no matter how hard I tried, I never came close to the real pros (there are many actual professionals from the transportation industry playing the game and trying things out). Have a look at this monster train station, for example (found in this forum thread):
Just stop and think for a moment. How much do you really know about transportation? Trucks, buses, trains, ships, airplanes and helicopters? Roads, maintenance, history and technology change? Road planning, bridges, tunnels, semaphores, roundabouts, ports, loading stations, warehouse? I can go on …
These games teach you a great deal about the complex world around you.
Creating a 1.3 Million vCPU Grid on AWS using EC2 Spot Instances and TIBCO GridServer
This Amazon AWS blog post provides a great insight into the benefits of the cloud computing in general and Amazon AWS in particular. The whole thing is well worth the read, but here are a few of my favorite bits.
The scale:
The grid grew to 61,299 Spot Instances (1.3 million vCPUs drawn from 34 instance types spanning 3 generations of EC2 hardware) as planned, with just 1,937 instances reclaimed and automatically replaced during the run, and cost $30,000 per hour to run, at an average hourly cost of $0.078 per vCPU. If the same instances had been used in On-Demand form, the hourly cost to run the grid would have been approximately $93,000.
The size of the Amazon AWS customers:
1.3 million vCPUs (5x the size of the largest on-premises grid)
The evolution of computing power over the last few years:
To give you a sense of the compute power, we computed that this grid would have taken the #1 position on the TOP 500 supercomputer list in November 2007 by a considerable margin, and the #2 position in June 2008. Today, it would occupy position #360 on the list.
Now, just for fun, exercise the idea of building something like this in house…